Photo Album Scrapbooks

I love reading blogs and have quite a few that I subscribe to and get email notifications so I can read every new post. Stacy Julian's blog is one that I read faithfully, just love her blog. Reading it just makes me feel happy. She always has something positive to say it seems. Recently, she blogged about Photo Album Scrapbooks ( PAS ) click here to read it. I love the catchy name and the entire idea. The perfect solution for scrapping special occassions with lots of photos or for the scrapper who doesn't have alot of time but wants the journaling and creative outlet.


I was first introduced to this type of scrapbooking ( well, sort of the same idea to me ) when DD#1 and Iwent to a Close To My Heart (CTMH) gathering 5 or 6 years ago. CTMH sells Four Pocket Pages and Six Pocket Pages for photo storage that fit their Post Bound Albums. At the gathering we made a stunning two page layout and we made matching embellies for a Four Pocket Page where we could have 6 photos (one pocket had a mini 4x6 page and journaling area on the back that took up one pocket. I knew that night I was hooked on this idea, how cool to scrapbook right there in your photo album. It couldn't get much easier than that.


I love looking at my photos, and since I have 50 years of photos and haven't been scrapbooking all those years, I don't think I could ever scrap all of those so I started doing what I think is the next best thing. I have put them all in CTMH four and six pocket photo storage pages and used the post bound leather albums. The albums are beautiful and my photos are all organized and in order by date. I do have three older albums that are 8 1/2"x 11" with enlargements and pages for the older smaller photos from years ago that I very carefully removed from the old magnetic type albums that were turning all the photos brown.


And although DH enjoys looking at my scrapbooks, he would rather have photos in albums. He says he gets distracted looking at the beautiful scrap embellies and it distracts from the photos. I have always made copies of photos that I put on my scrapbook pages and left the originals in the photo albums.


So this has worked great for us...until Christmas 2008 when one of my two dd's made the mistake of handing me their extra digital camera, a Rebel something or other that takes THE most awesome photos I have ever seen and I was taking them LOL. You see, I still used a 35mm film camera and really didn't want to change. It had always worked for me, who needed digital, it took all the fun out of opening the developed photos or so I thought.


I took hundreds of photos Christmas day and had a blast using it. Then I had 300 of those photos printed. What was I thinking...I don't have 300 photos from the past 5 years combined! So I decided that I would do a Christmas 2008 album and start a new tradition for me! I put all 300 of those photos in CTMH six pocket photo storage pages and a new CTMH post bound album just for Christmas 2008 photos. And since then I have scrapbooked some of the photos and left the others in the storage pages and just made 4"x6" mini pages for some of the photo pages. I don't feel at all pressured to get them scrapped, I can add completed scrapbook pages any time to the album, even years from now if I want. Or just enjoy the photos....either way, I don't feel like I "need "to scrapbook all of my photos any longer.

I have made this suggestion to several young moms who work and have new babies and felt so much pressure to "keep their scrapbooks up to date". These moms don't have time to scrapbook everything, and can't afford to pay me to do it for them so this works out great for them. I make a few special pages for them, they scrapbook when they can and the rest of their photos go in the six pocket pages like a photo album and the best thing, their photo memories are preserved and journaled and organized.

I sure hope that this helps someone out there who reads this and is thinking about starting to scrapbook and feels a little overwhelmed by it all or is feeling frustrated that they aren't caught up. Have fun with scrapbooking !!